What's the minimum start dominion you would use in a "normal" MP game?

For me it's 7 with an awake or napping pretender and 8 for a sleeping one. This seems to be generally ok, but I have been candle killed once and once a barely managed to stave it off and die a proper death in battle another time.

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I took 5 with an imprisoned bless chassis in RAND, it was pretty tight and took a lot of priest MM (I built a fortless temple to buy indie priests from to preach for scales) but it worked out. A nice benefit from the priest building was being able to dom-kill mictlan when his last army of nasty double blessed jags was running amok around my provinces, since I had a lot of targeted dominion spread. I'd probably try to find some points elsewhere to have a bit more if I did it again, and wouldn't go under it, but I'd say it proves that 5 isn't under a minimum.

I think 5 is low However, I've never played MP so I dont know any better. I usually play with 10. I rarely use bless strats. I tend to stick to the basics and win by dominion. This works great on HUGE maps.

Anything below 6 is "low". Can you be successful with what you might consider low starting dominion? Of course you can, but at 6 is the point that I notice that building and managing your dominion simplifies itself a bit. Around 8+ is where it gets quite easy. Easy domain spread is nice, but for example if you are using a rainbow mage or other Dom1 base pretender, getting above 6 costs a LOT of points for what you get. Also, high dom isn't always needed for a bless nation, taking Hinnom as an extreme example, it's hard to get the right bless with Hinnom, and get everything else the way you want it, and still put out more than 5 sacreds a turn - ever.

Generally, 99.9% of the time, if you are in any danger of a dom kill you are already being crushed. Say you own just 10 provinces, and only have 5 temples, clustered around your capital..... With a prophet and your pretender out, you are at an infinitesimally low risk of dom death. The game is engineered that way for a reason.....

Hadrian_II said:
I played lots of games with a dominion of 4 or 5, and i never ever had problems with being dom killed.

LOL

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